The 4 horsemen of your apocalypse

September 10, 2024, marks 20 years since I started in business.?To be honest, I wanted to create something to mark the occasion—at least for myself. Over the past couple of decades, I’ve learned a lot about growing organisations. But more than that, I’ve learned to spot the symptoms of what kills them. I’ve seen it all—those slow, creeping signs of decline that organisations often miss until it's too late. By sharing these consistent symptoms, my hope is that you’ll be able to see them too, and more importantly, avoid the destruction of your organisation.

The 4 horsemen

Not every organisation suffers from all four of these. Some are linked; others stand alone. But let me tell you this: even just one of these is enough to spell disaster. If you’ve got more than one in play, you’re on a one-way track to a breakdown. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but trust me—you’ve got an infection. And left untreated, it’s only going to get worse. The four horsemen I’m talking about are:

1. Stagnation
2. Insecurity
3. Selfishness
4. Disorganisation

Stagnation

If you don’t adapt and evolve, you won’t survive. It’s 2024, and we’re going through the equivalent of an industrial revolution every few months—no, really! Being 6 months, 12 months, or a couple of years behind can leave you decades behind your competitors. I get it. I understand how easy it is to fall behind. For most of human history, things moved at a snail's pace. When I started my first business back in 2004, the world was unrecognisable from what it is today. Social media wasn’t even close to what it is now, e-commerce was barely a concept, and digital advertising didn’t exist. Things were slow, but that’s not the world we live in anymore.

Stagnation is the first horseman for a reason—it sneaks in, hidden in the comfort of the familiar. It’s that dangerous place we default to, where everything feels safe and known. But make no mistake, growth only happens outside of your comfort zone, and your organisation is no different. Staying in your comfort zone is like never getting out of bed—it’s warm, it’s cosy, but stay there too long, and you end up with bed sores. And those bed sores? They lead to infection, and infection leads to amputation. Graphic? Yes. But this is how serious stagnation is.

So here’s a message for those still clinging to spreadsheets and PDFs to run their organisation: your competitors aren’t. It’s time to wake up and look at what’s happening in the world. If you’re not at least exploring how AI can shape your organisation, you’ll be forgotten, irrelevant, and left behind.

Insecurity

Let’s be honest: many of our parents, family, and friends didn’t teach us to feel secure in our lives. And how could they? They never learned it themselves. Society profits massively from our insecurities. You can’t sell makeup and beauty products to women who feel completely secure and confident, can you? I bring this up because I know what it’s like to feel insecure as a leader. When I started my company, everyone around me was at least 10, 20, or more years older. Trust me, that didn’t exactly boost my confidence.

But here’s the thing: if you let insecurity take hold in your personal life, and by extension in your organisation, it will destroy everything you’ve built to make yourself feel secure. Insecurity in leadership drains innovation, creativity, and problem-solving from your team. Want to know how to spot an insecure leader? They talk far more than they ask questions. They micromanage. They make their team feel like their ideas don’t matter. And the result? A disengaged team. Or what people now call “quiet quitting.”

In my experience (and there’s plenty of research backing this up), the people closest to the problems are often the best at solving them. That means your frontline staff, those who aren’t in management positions, are sometimes the ones with the best solutions. The freshest ideas. The creativity you need to be a market leader. But if insecurity is running the show, you’ll lose all of that incredibly valuable energy.

Selfishness

It’s not about you. No, really, it’s not. It’s about your customers, your clients—the people you seek to serve. Yes, I said?serve. You serve?them. They don’t serve?you.

Think about it: what’s it like walking into a shop or restaurant where the service is cold, transactional? It’s crap, right? Now, how often do you genuinely get into the mindset that?you’re?the lucky one? That?you?need them more than they need you? Because guess what—the people you’re chasing, the ones you?need?to buy into what you're doing, have all the choice in the world.

Unless you’ve invented something the world has never seen before, chances are you’re not offering something completely unique. Your customers have options. Plenty of them. So, being selfish and making it all about you is like being stuck at a family party with someone telling you their life story while you’re desperately trying to find the nearest exit. No one enjoys that.

So, the next time you write your website copy, post on social media, or even plan your strategy for the year, remember: it’s not about what?you?need. It’s about what?they?want. You have to get really good at empathy. Put yourself in their shoes—think about what they need, what they want, how they want to feel, and how you can take care of them.

I can tell you that every organisation I’ve seen crash and burn had one thing in common—they were selfish when it came to the people they needed. Forget this, and your ship will sink fast.

Disorganisation

Disorganisation is the most insidious of the lot. No one really thinks about it. Why? Because let’s face it—organisation is boring. It takes time. It takes systems and processes. At first, it doesn’t even feel like you’re making progress—it just feels like more work. And with everyone being time-poor, no one wants to invest in it. But here’s the reality: time is money, and I guarantee you’re wasting a ton of it every single day because of your disorganisation.

Think about how much time your team spends hunting through their inbox for?that?email. Or frantically searching for that piece of paper they scribbled notes on. Or trying to remember what was said in the last meeting. You’ve got a parasite in your organisation. It’s making you sick, draining your energy, and slowing you down. Most organisations are still acting like it’s the 1980s, with some big, creaky filing cabinet in the corner, where papers go to die.

If you’re disorganised, you’re losing money and momentum every day. And while you’re busy scrambling, your better-organised competitor is snapping up what you’re too slow to act on. It’s simple: a failure to plan is a plan to fail.

Or better yet:?organise or die.

Link to live document on Notion